Party Discipline: Vote as Told or Face Existential Consequences

Party Discipline: Vote as Told or Face Existential Consequences

The Fine Australian Tradition of Disagreeing Privately, Loudly, and Then Voting the Right Way Anyway

Australian political parties are, in theory, voluntary associations of like-minded individuals united by shared values and a common vision for the country. In practice, they are highly disciplined voting blocs in which individual members are expected to vote with the party on virtually all legislation, disagree with colleagues only in approved forums, and present a unified face to the public that bears, on occasion, only passing resemblance to the face visible in the caucus room the previous Tuesday.

Party discipline is the mechanism by which a parliament of 151 individually elected representatives functions as a government rather than a debating society. It is also, critics note, the mechanism by which 151 individually elected representatives are sometimes prevented from representing their electorates on matters where their electorate’s view and their party’s position are in inconvenient tension. Both observations are correct. Australian democracy has decided to live with this contradiction, largely because the alternative – 151 entirely independent members attempting to pass a budget – would be considerably worse.

The Whip: A Role With an Unfortunate Name and Significant Power

Each parliamentary party appoints a whip – a senior member responsible for ensuring that party members are present for votes, informed of the party’s position on legislation, and motivated to vote accordingly. The term derives from fox-hunting, in which the "whipper-in" kept hounds from straying. The analogy is considered unflattering by members of parliament, who prefer to describe themselves as disciplined colleagues rather than dogs, and who vote with the party anyway.

The whip’s toolkit includes the schedule (knowing when votes will occur and ensuring members are physically present), the count (maintaining an accurate picture of where every member stands before the division bell rings), and the conversation (the private, collegial, occasionally tense discussion in which a wavering member is reminded of their obligations, the party’s position, and the electoral consequences of being known as someone who cannot be relied upon).

"The whip doesn’t threaten," explains an anonymous former whip who requested identification as "a person who used to count things." "The whip informs. The whip reminds. The whip makes very clear what the situation is. The member then makes their own free choice. The free choices are almost always correct."

Factions: The Parties Within the Party

Both major parties contain internal factions – organised groupings of members aligned around ideological tendencies, personality networks, and the distribution of parliamentary positions. The Labor Party’s factions are formalised and named: the Left, the Right, and the Centre Unity, each maintaining its own organisational structure, meeting schedule, and approach to internal candidate allocation. The Liberal Party’s factions are less formal but equally real, divided broadly between moderates and conservatives – a distinction that has, since approximately 2015, been the primary fault line along which leadership challenges are organised.

Factions serve several functions. They aggregate power, enabling groups of members to negotiate as blocs for cabinet positions, committee chairs, and policy outcomes. They provide internal policy debate forums where disagreement can occur away from public view – the party equivalent of arguing about the thermostat in private rather than in front of guests. And they produce, with reliable regularity, the internal divisions that eventually surface as leadership challenges, factional defections, and the occasional spectacular public falling-out that political journalists describe as "a crisis" and political scientists describe as "the system working as designed, if not as intended."

The Conscience Vote: Disagreement by Official Permission

On certain matters – historically abortion, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage – parties have allowed conscience votes, freeing members from the obligation to follow the party line and permitting them to vote according to their own moral convictions. These occasions are treated with some ceremony, as though individual judgment is a special event rather than what voters believed they were electing.

The 2017 marriage equality postal survey – a plebiscite conducted because the parliament could not agree to hold a free vote, which is a sentence worth reading twice – resulted in a 61.6% yes vote, after which parliament passed the legislation with a conscience vote, confirming what the postal survey had already established: that the parliament’s collective judgment, freed briefly from factional management, aligned with the electorate’s view. The lesson drawn by political parties was not, as one might hope, that conscience votes should occur more frequently, but rather that the postal survey had been a good idea, a conclusion that parliament has since revisited.

Pre-Selection: The Real Disciplinary Mechanism

The most powerful tool of party discipline is not the whip, the faction, or the conscience vote. It is pre-selection – the internal party process by which candidates are endorsed for electorates. A member who consistently votes against the party line, publicly contradicts shadow ministers, or otherwise demonstrates a commitment to individual judgment over collective discipline faces the possibility of losing pre-selection: of arriving at the next election without the party’s endorsement, without its campaign resources, and without the party name on the ballot paper that approximately 60% of their voters were actually voting for.

This possibility focuses the mind considerably. It produces, in the main, disciplined party members who save their disagreements for caucus, express their reservations through approved channels, and vote with the party in the division lobby while composing their memoirs in their heads.

The result is a parliament that votes in highly predictable blocs, that passes legislation when governments have majorities and blocks it when they don’t, and that occasionally produces, in the gap between what members are permitted to say publicly and what they actually think, the kind of anonymous briefings that make political journalism so reliably entertaining.

For a richly documented account of political parties maintaining internal discipline until they spectacularly don’t, the archives of The London Prat’s Westminster party management files – prat.uk – are essential reading, covering a system where "collective cabinet responsibility" has been tested with impressive frequency and has not always held.

See also Newsthump on the specific parliamentary phenomenon of members "fully supporting" a leader approximately forty-eight hours before voting to remove them.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com